


Sister, Sister

by TheClassyCorvid



Series: The London Garden [1]
Category: Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Genre: Gen, New Family, Not Canon Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:33:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27368122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheClassyCorvid/pseuds/TheClassyCorvid
Summary: Robert returned to England with company.
Series: The London Garden [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2029999
Kudos: 12





	Sister, Sister

“Margaret: meet Victor.”

For all the eloquence Robert had poured into writing letters more florid than a wildflower meadow, his introduction fell flat as a sandwich board on the sidewalk. _Splak._ No gilt or glitter. It was too important. Too much magnitude to frill it up like a little lace doily and pompously present it to her.

Margaret found it rather anticlimactic.

She looked down at Robert’s company. Way down. 

Where was the noble, beautiful, entrancingly mysterious wanderer that her brother couldn’t peel himself away from? Because this definitely wasn’t it. Not as far as _she_ could tell.

He was all of four-foot-nine, give or take a cowlick, and was reminiscent of anthropomorphic death mixed with a sixth-grader and microwaved just enough to avoid scaring anyone but still cold in the middle. 

“Are you _quite_ certain he recovered?” Margaret said before she could reel it back. 

Robert didn’t seem to notice the hesitation. “Enough to make the journey home,” he admitted.

Victor wedged between them, goading Robert out of his way by surreptitiously digging his elbow into Robert’s spleen. Robert obeyed and helped himself to two steps back.

Victor squared himself in front of Margaret. Margaret sensed she was being backed into the corner by a chipmunk that believed itself to be filling a man's boots.

“I thank you for your courtesy, ma’am,” he said gravely. He sounded as though he were squinting down at a script, droning off a toneless monologue in a stuffy tenor. “Your kind brother has sung many praises in your favor.”

“Has he?” Margaret said blandly. Not half as many as he’d told in Victor’s favor.

“I greatly appreciate your generosity in inviting me to your home. I trust that, if allowed, I should be able to repay your family somehow, Mrs. Sav—”

The “ille” snagged in Victor’s throat. The meager tint of color drained from his face and down his collar, leaving him gray as cold concrete. With a ragged inhale, he wrenched his head to the side and hacked his lungs into his fist in a chorus of hoarse, goopy coughs. He doubled over further and further with each one until he’d almost folded in on himself. 

Margaret caught Robert’s gaze. He managed a placating, sheepish grin. Margaret was suddenly ten years old again, insisting that “Bobby, _no_ , take them outside! Uncle Thomas will kill you!” while Robert flashed that grin and sneaked the basketful of bedraggled stray kittens upstairs. 

She was one blink away from crying up her guts. 

She snatched up a bundle of her skirts in one hand and stooped beside Victor, clutching his skinny shoulder to steady him. He ducked his head lower, almost gagging himself on his knuckles to stifle another round of disgusting crunchy coughs.

“You aren’t well at all, my dear,” Margaret said. “It’s fortunate that Robert agreed to turn back when he did. You could never recover in that dark musty ship, moldering in your own wet clothes and fending it off with brandy.”

“It wasn’t my idea!” Robert interjected, appalled, as if Margaret had implied that he’d spoonfed Victor arsenic. He gathered himself. “It’s a well-known remedy among sailors.”

His tone suggested “as if _you_ would know.” Margaret ignored him.

She tucked her arm around Victor’s shoulders and eased him upright. He stumbled. All at once he locked up, rigid and as tall as he could be, and held it for a couple of heartbeats. He almost melted. Margaret grappled for fistfuls of his coat to hold him up before he crumpled to the ground and ate a serving of cold gray London dirt.

“Robert, love,” Margaret called. She hefted Victor up when he sagged. “Your Genevese suitor is winded. The fresh air snuffed him right out. Help bring him inside, won’t you?”

Robert lingered for a moment before bolting faster than if he’d been called to supper. 

Margaret suspected he could have wrangled Victor with little effort and carried him to the house. Robert, however, was either too frantic to consider that or too embarrassed. Funny. He was uproariously romantic. An absolute sap. She always expected he would have loved to sweep up a lover and proudly tote them home in his arms. Perhaps, Margaret thought, some men do have dignity.

Together they hauled Victor inside, ignoring the gulleys his dragging heels carved through the garden. Margaret hooked her hands beneath his arms and Robert took his ankles to hoist him onto the bed. He plopped like a rag doll. Margaret fumbled with the Gordian knot of his cravat that secured his snug collar. Robert banged drawers and doors in a panicked blanket raid.

“Robert,” Margaret said over her shoulder. “Do calm down, dear.”

Robert peered from behind the precarious tower of quilts he’d gathered. His eyes were pinched and the wrinkles that made trenches between his eyebrows made him look more like forty-eight. 

Margaret tugged Robert’s favorite quilt from its place sandwiched between the yellow patchwork and the floral blue one. Robert watched in a mixture of awe and unease like a spectator at a surgery as she snapped the creases out and began tucking the blanket cozily around Victor.

“It isn’t a fault of mine, is it?” Robert said wistfully.

“What?”

Robert floundered, as though he’d wedged himself into a corner.

“That he’s ill.” 

“Oh, Robert,” Margaret said with a tart pang of sympathy. “You told me that you found him exhausted and freezing and nearly starved, didn’t you?”

“Yes . . . . “

“How could that possibly be your fault?”

Robert hedged. He examined the floor with utmost interest, nudging the toe of his boot against a piece of rainbow that filtered through the window. 

“It feels easier somehow,” he said at last. “If I take the blame, perhaps I can also take the responsibility to fix it.”

“You fret too much,” Margaret said. 

He eased closer, now at her elbow. She glanced up at him. He’d all but forgotten she was there. He stared down at Victor with all the reverence of approaching a brand new Bible spread over an altar.

She wanted to laugh, but somehow she couldn’t. 

He still didn’t look at her.

“Do you understand my letters now, Margaret?” His eyes were narrow; strangely pained. “Can you see how, even in such a state, he’s captivated me?”

The sunlight slabs cutting through the curtains lit up all the premature white in Victor’s hair like tinsel. There was something about him. Ghostly? Too thin. Too pale. Too young and too old at the same time. Too hardened and too soft, too careworn and too delicate, too much and not enough, and if she squinted, he was _almost_ pretty, and all at once she loved him, because she didn’t know what else to feel.

“You’ve always had a penchant for chasing the unknown,” she said. “Maybe that’s why he fascinates you.”

Victor roused beneath the blanket, drawing a long, thin breath that caught on his teeth. His eyelashes ticked a couple of times. When his eyes opened, they fixed in a daze on the fleur-de-lis papered wall, or maybe through it. A faint bloom of color warmed his lurid cheeks in a fevered blush.

“There you are,” Margaret said through a sigh. Some of the concern dissolved. She leaned over the bed. Victor blinked slowly. Clouds still darkened his eyes. Margaret moved her fingers across his cheek to tuck a long piece of hair behind his ear. Her nails rolled gently over his skin. Still slogging through the fog, Victor turned his head to ask for the touch again.

“ . . . ‘Lizabeth?”

It came out in a mumble that Margaret barely parsed, sounding like it had to find its way through a mouthful of pudding. She glanced at Robert. He looked stricken.

 _Oh._ Elizabeth. Sister. The dead sister. No—the murdered sister. Margaret remembered now. Her stomach had knotted up when she scanned Robert’s letters. She’d imagined how Elizabeth had looked in life. Vibrant, beautiful, bouncing curls and a dazzling smile, perhaps. But every time, the pleasant thoughts mangled, and she could only picture a stiff body, a dull bird’s nest of dry hair, glassy eyes, and a soft slender throat crushed and mottled purple. 

It was terrible of her, wasn’t it? To pore over such morbid daydreams about a stranger? But the letters—Victor’s story—haunted her like an egg salad sandwich on the second day. 

She swallowed. Something weighed in her chest, a small, sharp rock, and settled somewhere to the left of her heart.

“I can’t be your Elizabeth,” she said quietly. She caressed her fingers through his hair. “But I can be your Margaret. For as long as you want, you can have a sister yet, my dear.”

Victor now watched her through his eyelashes, still drowsy. A glimmer cut through the haze in his eyes, a lighthouse beam over a misty ocean.

“Your hands are so gentle,” he said at last. It was a murmur, half-breathed, a little garbled by residual French. “For a moment . . . if I kept my eyes closed . . . I felt so keenly that I were home. Home—reclining on the window seat, bathed in sunlight, weary of a book and drifting to sleep propped upon Elizabeth’s lap with her fingers playing through my curls.”

Margaret’s thoughts ground up gravel as they bumped to a halt. Her hand froze.

What could she say to that? “I’m sorry”? “My condolences”? “Too bad your lily-livered pansy cowardice brutally murdered your innocent little sister”?

Too much time passed while she fidgeted over something to say. A few seconds, or maybe five minutes. A response would have been awkward by now, anyway. 

Victor’s eyes shut. With a resigned sigh, he shifted his shoulders to sink deeper into the pillows. He blew out the breath he’d held in a soft whoosh that stirred his bangs. Bit by bit, the tension drained away and softened his features. He didn't look like someone whose life had fallen to shambles around him. He didn't look like he'd spent the last eight years making the worst decisions imaginable and standing back in horror as everyone around him paid the price in his place. He didn't look like a boastful Icarus or a conniving Prometheus. He looked tired.

Margaret kept stroking his hair back, letting him imagine the warm window seat back home.


End file.
